HARRYHAUSEN is the genius behind scores of fantasy figures from films including Jason and the Argonauts and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and says he has managed to preserve almost all of his creations.

SPECIAL effects legend Ray Harryhausen has brought scores of weird and wonderful creatures to the big screen but only one of them ever finished up on the dinner table.

His fabulous fantasy figures include the sword-fighting skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts, the cyclops in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and the dinosaurs that terrorised Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC.

But the one on the dinner menu was the crab from Mysterious Island, the adventure in which American Civil War soldiers, led by Michael Craig, are marooned on an island populated by gigantic animals.

One of the film’s highlights is when the castaways battle with a monster crab – which in reality was a normal-sized crustacean that Harryhausen had bought in the Harrods food store in London.

He used his genius to animate the crab and create the impression that it was a giant sea creature.

But before he did that – by placing a metal armature within the crab’s shell – the shellfish was killed humanely.

Harryhausen, 92, said: “We couldn’t boil it because it would have turned bright red. So the lady who killed it humanely took all the crab meat out and I guess she had a crab dinner.”

Usually, Harryhausen made his stop-motion figures out of rubber and, in the early days of his cinema career, the special effects wizard used the family oven to bake his models.

But the result of that was many of the meals eaten by him, his wife Diana and their daughter Vanessa often smelled of rubber.

He said: “I had to use that oven for my moulds until I got a wooden oven. The food didn’t taste of rubber but it did smell like it – you just had to ignore it.”

Ray Harryhausen

In his epic career, Harryhausen’s brilliance has been seen in films that range from The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and First Men on the Moon to It Came From Beneath the Sea and Clash of the Titans.

Now his genius is being celebrated in the documentary Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan, in which many of the film world’s top directors talk about how much they owe this master of stop-motion animation.

Movie-makers who were inspired by Harryhausen include Hollywood legends James Cameron and Steven Spielberg, movie mavericks Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam, Disney boss John Lasseter of Toy Story fame and Nick Park, the Oscar-winning creator of Wallace and Gromit.

They say that without the magical world that was dreamed up by Harryhausen, we wouldn’t have had films such as Avatar, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Jurassic Park.

Some film-makers have even paid their own tribute to Harryhausen on the big screen – the restaurant in Monsters Inc is called after him and his name appears on the piano in Corpse Bride.

Ray Harryhausens model of Medusa

He said: “I am grateful they find the films inspiring. We made them for entertainment and I just wanted to do the best I could. So I am very grateful that they have inspired a great number of people. Very few films inspire people.”

Harryhausen’s wife, Diana Livingstone Bruce, is a direct descendant of the famous Scots missionary and explorer David Livingstone. He is so proud of the family link with Scotland that he commissioned the making of the statue that stands at the David Livingstone Centre in Blantyre, Lanarkshire.

His career in movies spans six decades and Harryhausen can pinpoint the precise moment that he wanted to bring his brand of animation to the big screen.

It was when, as an awestruck 13-year-old schoolboy, he saw King Kong for the first time and was amazed by the animators’ skills that brought the giant gorilla and other creatures to the cinema.

He said: “It really set me off on my career. I had been toying with models – as a hobby – and when I saw King Kong, I found out that you could make them move.

“The animation in King Kong is still amazing today and that’s what fascinated me all those years ago.”

Of all his films, Harryhausen has a special fondness for Jason and the Argonauts, in which he brought the weird and wonderful world of Greek mythology to the screen.

Harryhausen, who worked for four months on the famous skeleton scene, said: “It’s the most complete film. But when they were making the Blu-ray edition, you could see some of the wires so we had to get rid of them.”

Although he is a gifted animator and perfectionist, Harryhausen retains a keen sense of humour about film-making, chuckling at the iconic image of a fur-bikinied Raquel Welch as a prehistoric woman in One Million Years BC.

He said: “If cave women looked like Raquel, then we have regressed today.”

And he remembers that a huge octopus he made for a film only had six tentacles – because he didn’t have the funds to stretch to making and animating eight.

Harryhausen’s final film, in 1981, was another Greek myth epic, Clash of the Titans – which featured Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith and Ursula Andress.

It was remade in 2010 with a cast that included Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes and Avatar’s Sam Worthington – with a budget that is reckoned to have been $100million more than the cost of the original.

But Harryhausen wasn’t involved and he stresses that he can’t compare the latest version of Clash of the Titans with the film that he helped make.

He said: “I haven’t seen the remake but people who I have talked to about it say that our film is a classic compared to that.”

Harryhausen has managed to preserve almost all of the magnificent models that he created for his movies but he says the biggest problem is finding places where they can be stored.

He added: “It is the largest collection of its kind because I kept everything.”